The manifest, signed by 32 prominent religious figures of the likes of former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Zalman Malmad, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Rabbi Israel Ariel, Rabbi Abraham Zukerman and Rabbi Israel Rosen, to name a few, calls on the IDF to refrain from imposing such classes on religious soldiers.

Israel's soldiers must keep the mitzvah of observing modesty, said the manifest, adding that "over the past few years, the military has demonstrated a lapse in morals, by allowing more and more classes to be given by female instructors, and endorsing male and female integration in more of its units."

Such moves, continues the manifest, along with the soldiers young age and their being away from home for long periods of time, pose "a grave problem", since their daily – and nightly – encounters with women in the service "go well beyond the norms of civil life."

The rabbis end the manifest by calling on IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi and Defense Minister Ehud Barak "to refrain from forcing any soldier to take part in activities involving women or attending classes given by female instructors."

While members of the Nahal Haredi Battalion have decided to abandon the yeshiva benches in exchange for an M-16 rifle in the IDF, their past study of intricate Talmudic passages is assisting them today in turning into top-of-the-line combat soldiers.

Last week, soldiers from the battalion - also known as Netzah Yehuda - came in first place in a sharp-shooting course at the Adam Training Facility near Modi'in.

"Since the soldiers are haredi, they never really studied advanced math," the source said. "The course trainers broke their heads trying to figure out how the soldiers caught on so quickly until they realized that due to their experience studying Talmud it was a piece of cake for them to understand how to solve the complicated equations."

“This will not succeed unless we have the support of the Israeli companies, and that requires a push from the chief rabbis there,” Genack said.

Over the last year, Genack said, he has had numerous private talks about this issue with both Rabbi Yona Metzger, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, and Rabbi Shlomo Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi.

In late 2007, Metzger and Amar convened a meeting of rabbis in Israel to discuss the issue, according to people involved.

Afterwards, Genack said he received a letter in which he was assured that the Israeli chief rabbis were looking to change the practice. Just last week, Genack said he spoke with Metzger on the phone about pushing for change.

The Israeli animal rights group, Concern for Helping Animals in Israel, has recently written to both chief rabbis questioning whether the South American practice could be compatible with Jewish law.

The letter, which was written by Rabbi Adam Frank, an activist with the organization, asked: “Since less painful and more humane methods of animal restraint and treatment exist and are used in the kosher slaughter process, is the Shackling & Hoisting of a conscious animal an unnecessarily cruel practice, thus defining it as prohibited under Jewish law?”

The law against unnecessary infliction of pain to animals applies not only to the animals' physical well being, but also to the animals' emotional well being.

If better systems exist for protecting the welfare of workers and animals, why do the Israeli and US kashrut authorities condone their continued systematic abuse in South America?

Judaism is prideful of the fact that Jewish law protects the rights of workers and protects against the unnecessary infliction of pain to an animal.

It is for these reasons that the exploitation of worker and animal welfare by current rabbinic leadership is so disappointing, and enraging.

The Jewish laity places its trust in rabbinic authority. Not only is a halachic cut assumed, but a kosher leadership is expected.

For its part, the Conservative movement in America is in the process of creating the Hehhsher Tzedek - a seal of approval of worker rights and animal welfare that will accompany kosher supervision stamps for qualifying kosher meat producers.

Still, the ability and responsibility to implement caring changes in kosher meat production is in the hands of the Israeli rabbinate and the OU - the two authorities who support the import of South American kosher meat for sale in their respective countries.

During a rabbinical conference held at a Dead Sea hotel MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni delivered a speech in which he addressed the bill regarding brain-dead patients on respirators proposed by Otniel Schneller (Kadima), who was in attendance.

Rabbi Gafni objected to the position espoused by Schneller, who claimed that all gedolei Torah support the proposal.

Rabbi Gafni said that in fact the opposite is true.

Maran HaRav Eliashiv shlita issued instructions to oppose the law, saying that according to halochoh as long as the heart continues to beat the patient is considered alive in every respect and it is strictly forbidden to deny medical treatment, and as such UTJ has decided to oppose the bill.

Rabbi Gafni even called on every family who faces such situations, chas vesholom, to demand full treatment for the patient based on legal rights.

I hereby reiterate my opinion, which I put on record on the eighteenth of Menachem Av 5751, that according to our holy Torah, as long as the heart beats, even though the patient has suffered brain death, there is no license whatsoever to remove any organ from his body.

The writer, editor of www.TraditionOnline.org, teaches at Yeshivat Hakotel and is pursuing a doctorate in Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University.

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Igrot Moshe YD III:132) ruled in 1976 that "brain-stem death" fulfills the halachic criterion of death, even if the heart continues to beat from artificial respiration.

The Chief Rabbinate of Israel (1987) subsequently endorsed this position, and like Feinstein, called standard and non-experimental organ transplants a great mitzva. The Conservative and Reform movements also encourage organ donation.

One should settle in advance matters regarding life-and-death decisions, including signing an organ donor card, in careful consultation with family members and competent rabbinic authorities.

While I myself am a strong advocate of the "brain-stem death" criteria and organ donation, I encourage everyone to find out more information about this sensitive and important topic.

Member of Knesset Avshalom Vilan is a member of Meretz-Yahad; Maurice Stroun is a researcher in biochemistry at the University of Geneva.

Ben-Gurion understood what Metzger, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and religious extremists down the line refuse to understand: In Jerusalem, only a political compromise that is completely separated from the religious conflict will work.

Israel's extremist rabbis and nationalist leaders who refuse to accept this fact will lead us to the edge of the abyss.

Sderot's population is overwhelmingly Sephardi and tends, therefore, to be more traditional and faith-oriented than average. As a result, it is natural that many turn to prayer even if observance of Orthodox practice is weak.

Surprisingly, despite the challenges it faces, Sderot does not have an active chief rabbi. Rabbi David Bar-Chen, a housebound octogenarian, is the town's official rabbi, but he is ill and inactive.

The appointment of new rabbis, both in Sderot and elsewhere, has been frozen since the dismantling of the Religious Affairs Ministry in 2003. Although the ministry was recently reestablished, Minister Yitzhak Cohen has yet to appoint rabbis.

Matt Bar, 28, was born and raised in Iowa to a Reform family. He's taught at Reform and Conservative Hebrew schools, but at this point in his life, he says he's reluctant to identify with any particular movement.

"A movement doesn't grab me the way that Judaism grabs me," he explains.

Bar's next album-his fifth, but the first to deal exclusively with biblical themes-is due out this summer, and much of it has been underwritten by Kehillot B'Yachad, an organization that encourages Conservative and Reform congregations abroad to support non-Orthodox congregations in Israel.

He's also heading to the U.S. for a summer tour of Jewish camps and says hardly a day goes by when a Hebrew school in North America doesn't contact him.

Though Israel's premier airline has long had an audio channel with music by religious Jewish artists, this has fallen short of demands by fervently Orthodox clients for educational content, Ma'ariv reported Monday.

“The company is certainly thinking of operating a special channel for the ultra-Orthodox sector on the VOD services on our planes. It is expected that establishment of the channel will take a few months,” the newspaper quoted El Al as saying in a statement.

The new channel, if instituted, would likely include the traditional "Daf Yomi" lesson covering a page of the Talmud each day.

[Hamodia] is attracting younger generations of Orthodox Jews who are moving to the right of their Modern Orthodox parents.

They became more fervently Orthodox after spending time studying in Israeli yeshivas, according to sociologist Samuel Heilman.

"These are people who are relatively new to this haredi outlook, and they need to know how to think and they need to know what" the haredi worldview includes, Heilman said in a phone interview from Israel, where he is on sabbatical.

"This is the kind of thing that in a different culture and society, they would learn on the street.

The decision by the haredi-oriented Web site www.ladaat.net to erase the face of distinguished law professor Ruth Gavison from its photo coverage of the Winograd Commission report typifies a regrettable trend toward using the religious concept of "modesty" as a cudgel in holding back the advancement of women.

But why are women's photos really banned? Is it really because women's photos are always salacious, or because acting in a way in which a media outlet would want to print your photo is in itself a violation of the code?

That is, seeing the photo of Ruth Gavison might inspire a young browser to intensify her studies and grow up to become a woman of distinction in the public sphere. Boys would also grow up recognizing that sometimes there are important women in government, in courts of law and in academia.

He takes as his premise the idea that important parts of the Haredi community “are undergoing a selective process of Israelization, that is to say, an internalization of cultural values and patterns of behavior, the source of which is the surrounding society.”

According to Caplan, “this process is at odds with the separatist and isolationist goals that continue to characterize official Haredi rhetoric.” In other words, Caplan believes that there is a gap between the day-to-day life of Haredim and the ideology that purports to represent and define it.

In a rumination that appears at the end of the book, he asks whether “the hard core of Haredi society is showing any sense of commitment to Israeli society and a willingness to share the national burden?”

A splinter religious party is luring Anglos with the prospects of influencing national politics.

Achi (My Brother) has launched registration drive to recruit English-speakers into its ranks. Prof. Israel Aumann, the U.S.-born Nobel Peace Prize winning game theorist, has already joined, according to the party.

"Via Achi we hope to have an Anglo in a serious position on a national level," said Beit Shemesh deputy mayor Shalom Lerner, who chairs the party's Anglo division.

MKs Effie Eitam and Yitzchak Levy formed the party in 2006 after quitting the National Religious Party-National Union Knesset bloc.

The drive is part of a larger attempt to "rejuvenate and unify the ranks of the nationalist camp," according to Achi.

Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef is fighting back. After taking fire from Ashkenazi rabbis on his rulings regarding the shmita year, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s son is waging a war of his own.

In a newsletter distributed by the Rabbinical Centre of Europe, Rabbi Yosef condemned Ashkenazi heads of yeshivas who are encouraging their Sephardic pupils to follow their customs and are ‘turning them Ashkenazi’ in their practices.

Shas is an opposition party in practice, although it has sufficient audacity to continue benefiting from its place in government without accepting the collective responsibility that the position requires.

This approach is evident not only in its attitude to the question of the Gaza Strip and negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, but also in its demand for the restoration of stipends for children to the high levels they were at five years ago.

Such a move would constitute an abandonment of the economic policy that encouraged people to join the work force.

Shas also supports the initiative of United Torah Judaism that has called for an exemption for the Haredi education system from the requirement to include in its curriculum core subjects like math and English.

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has announced it will open a Jerusalem office later this month, in an attempt to promote legislation and lobby Knesset members that further ZOA's ideological mission.

The office, which Jeffrey Daube will head, plans to work closely with North American expatriates "to help empower this often politically underrepresented group of steadfast Zionists," stated the ZOA.

The New York based ZOA will also track the activities of "hostile NGOs and other like-minded anti-Israel agitators," as well as "develop proactive measures to mitigate their impact," the organization announced.

U.S.-born Daube, a professional educator, has been active pro-Israel bodies such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Palestinian Media Watch.

In the wake of an attempt by Palestinians to burn down Joseph's Tomb – Judaism's third holiest site – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction issued a statement denying it will help restore the shrine, referring to both the shrine and the biblical patriarch as "Muslim."

"Pay no attention to the rumors that we will work with Israel to restore the burial site of the holy Muslim Joseph," said the statement, issued from Nablus, the biblical city of Shechem. "We are going to guard this holy Muslim site."

A new Yeshiva of Higher Torah Learning for post-high school students will open in the ancient city of Yafo (Jaffa) in September 2008. Rabbi Eliyahu Mali of Bet El is leading the initiative alongside the existing Rosh Yehudi Jewish Outreach core group in the seaside southern neighborhood of Tel Aviv.

Once a flourishing spiritual center with over 100 worshippers, the Ohr Yisrael Synagogue now holds prayers only on the Sabbath and holidays with just over ten regular attendees.

The synagogue members, plagued with maintenance costs, reduced the size of the main sanctuary by building a wall down the middle of it.

The officials, who also said the quake caused cracks in several local residential buildings, said the hole was a meter deep, two meters long and meter and a half wide.

The Islamic Movement blamed Israel for the hole, saying Israel is digging tunnels in the area that undermine the stability in the area of the Al-Aqsa mosque. The organization urged Islamic states to take action to stop Israeli excavations in the area.

The Moskowitz Prize for Zionism was established in recognition of the people who put Zionism into action in today's Israeli society – at times risking their own personal security, placing the collective before personal needs, and doing what it takes to ensure a strong, secure Jewish homeland.

The Moskowitz Prize for Zionism fund will grant an annual award to persons who best personify the essence of modern Zionism in Israel, providing innovative or exceptional activity that reflects the values and challenges that face Zionism today - in education, culture, settlement, social action and other spheres.

The Lion of Zion award - $100,000

Religion and State in Israel

February 18, 2008 (Section 2) (Continued from Section 1)

Editor – Joel Katz

Religion and State in Israel is not affiliated with any organization or movement.